by Nir Rosen
“There is a strong Sunni awakening in Lebanon,” Mustafa’s younger brother Khudhr told me. “We all became terrorists,” another man said. “Hassan Nasrallah made us all terrorists. We don’t want to fight Israel.” Instead, they told me, they would fight the Shiites with all they had.
“We as the shabab of Tabbaneh are fighting as Islamists, not as the opposition or the majority,” Mustafa explained. “We are in solidarity in defense of our religion.” He told me that they feared a repeat of the massacres they had faced in the 1980s by the Syrians and their allies.
Whenever power was used against Salafis and Islamists, they became more devout and defended their religion, Mustafa told me. There was no area in Lebanon that had poverty and neglect and didn’t have people embracing their religion. “The comfortable citizen doesn’t think about the gun,” he said. “In this area it’s like you’re in a Palestinian camp.” If they could have left their area, they would have gone down to Beirut to defend Sunnis, he told me. They were resentful of the Sunni leadership, which had betrayed them. “During Nahr al-Barid they accused the shabab of belonging to Fatah al-Islam because they were Sunnis. They killed who they killed and imprisoned who they imprisoned just because they were Sunnis. But Hizballah did what they did in Beirut, and nobody questioned them or confronted them.”
“If we close the airport road, they will say we are terrorists,” one man said. “Yesterday I started to pray because I felt like I am in the hands of God. And that’s how I became a terrorist. They pushed me and abandoned me, and I am alone. What can I do? I seek shelter with God.”
One day I showed up in front of Mustafa’s shop and found him wearing a new military vest he had just purchased for twenty dollars. The other guys wanted one too. His Salafi cousin Shadi Jbara gave him money to purchase more. There had been fighting the night before. One of the men bragged that in all their fighting ten civilians had died in the clashes but none of the fighters had been killed.
Shadi had just been released from prison two weeks earlier and was opening a bakery. Along with several other Al Qaeda wanna-bes, he had tried to blow up a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shadi’s father had been assassinated during the battles of the 1980s, and he bragged that his mother had become a mujahida, carrying an AK-47 and shooting RPGs at the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen. Shadi had known some of the Fatah al-Islam men in prison. One of them, an Algerian, told Shadi he had come to Lebanon to defend Sunnis from Shiites.
At first Shadi wasn’t sure if he could talk to me because he hadn’t received permission from the sheikh he followed. He had once been like any other guy, he told me, going out at night, chasing women. In 1991 he met a man who led him to the right path—the path of God. He went to Saudi Arabia in 1993 and met with Afghan Arabs and leaders of Salafi movements. He worked in a restaurant, and at night he would study there. After five years he returned from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden gave orders to attack U.S. businesses; the easiest targets for Shadi and his friends were restaurants, so they decided to attack a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They placed one kilogram of TNT by the restaurant early in the morning so nobody would get hurt. They didn’t want to cause casualties, just damage to the restaurant to gain media recognition.
Shadi explained that his friends had made a tactical error when they attacked a McDonald’s. Before leaving their explosives, they had sat down to eat and were captured on the security camera. Most of the men from the group were from Tabbaneh. They were rookies and confessed to the police immediately, informing on the KFC group as well. Prison was like a university, Shadi said. He spent five years behind bars and met men from different groups. At their peak Salafis like him numbered 420 in the prison. They were categorized as terrorists and separated from other inmates. In prison they had access to DVDs and CDs with lectures by Zarqawi and other famous jihadists. “Zarqawi, God have mercy on him, influenced the shabab more than bin Laden did,” he told me.
Fatah al-Islam was not a Syrian creation, he insisted. Many of its men had fought in Iraq or Bosnia. Some had belonged to Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq. Most were Palestinians from Syria’s Yarmuk camp. Syria was like a reservoir for these groups, he told me, but thousands of men had been arrested there. Lebanon was a small country, and it was hard for Al Qaeda to operate there, he explained. Most of the Al Qaeda men in Lebanon weren’t planning operations in Lebanon but were looking to Iraq.
Sunnis in Lebanon were very weak, he said. “The Sunnis of Beirut are not fighters; they are traders. If there were fifty Salafi jihadi guys in Beirut, then Hizballah would have lost a lot. The only people who can face Hizballah must have an ideology and a military. We were very angry at Saad. Hizballah is a military party; you can’t fight them with politics.” Shiites in prison were celebrating and shouting for Ali after the Hizballah victory in Beirut. But Salafis in prison were happy when they heard about the Halba massacre. I asked Shadi where I could hear a strong sermon. “Sermons don’t affect people,” he told me. “It’s the small studying sessions that affect people. The guys who talk about jihad in the sermons tell people to stay home and not go to jihad.”
Shadi thought Prime Minister Siniora was an infidel, apostate, and ally of the Americans. But the Hizballah-led siege of Siniora’s government was not about Siniora, he said; it was about the sect. Shadi had friends who had fought in Iraq, but it was harder than ever to go there. Because there was so much pressure on veterans of the jihad in Iraq once they returned to Lebanon, many mujahideen preferred to die in Iraq, Mustafa approached his Salafi brother and Shadi and gave them instructions. “We need you sheikhs to take the mountain in the front, and we will follow.” Shadi responded that they were lacking ammunition and needed to better organize themselves. Shadi told me he understood that the people of Tabbaneh were being used by the Sunni elite in the country. And he knew that when that elite pressed a button again, the fighters of Tabbaneh would once more be activated.
The walls of Tabbaneh were covered with posters of Khalil Akkawi, the slain leader of the Tawhid movement. In the early 1980s he had been an ally of Kanan Naji. Together they had fought the Syrians. Akkawi was assassinated in 1986. I spoke with his son, Arabi, who remained very respected and connected throughout Tripoli because of his father’s legacy of resistance. Arabi had been nine years old at the time of his father’s death. Policemen smuggled him out of Tabbaneh with his mother and sister in the back of a pickup truck because the Alawites were looking for them to kill them.
The people of Tabbaneh did not view the Beirut fighting as a political dispute, Arabi told me. To them it was simply Shiites attacking Sunnis. They felt they were slapped in the face and had to react in Tripoli. If the Future Movement was weakened, then the Salafis would take their place. “Salafis are raging, and it’s the right environment for Salafis and Al Qaeda to grow,” he told me. Some Salafis had brought weapons to Tabbaneh with the support of officials from the Interior Ministry such as Gen. Ashraf Riffi. “On the street people are saying, ‘We wish Fatah al-Islam still existed.’ Al Qaeda became acceptable now. The environment is welcoming.”
There was no alternative to the Future party for Sunnis, he told me, and Future had not lost popularity. “Whenever sectarian conflict increases, then Future gains in popularity.” Arabi believed it was his father’s former ally Naji who had started the most recent battle with Jabal Mohsen. He told me that Naji’s men launched RPGs at the Alawites and opened fire on their neighborhood, so the Alawites thought the Sunnis were attacking them. Naji was backed by Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, Lebanon’s most prominent Salafi.
I returned regularly to the neighborhood. Tensions would occasionally increase, the army would withdraw, and people would return to their fighting positions. One explosion took down much of an apartment building. Men with military vests and AK-47s materialized suddenly. One of them had a body full of tattoos: “Because I love you,” said one; another said, “I’m not afraid of death but my mother’s tears kill me.”
I returned to see Shahal again, in his office in the Ab
u Samra area of Tripoli. There was a more obvious armed presence outside and inside his office than before. On his desk next to plastic flowers was a leaflet that said, “The Salafi Current in Lebanon is calling for the Sunnis to organize to face any danger.” Before we started, he closed his eyes and recited a long prayer. Then he opened his light blue eyes and started talking. A big fitna (internal strife) had happened, he told me; if it wasn’t contained it would open the door to dangerous events. Sunnis in Beirut were under heavy pressure because it was the capital and they were weaker than Sunnis in the north. There was a plot against Sunnis, but the north was their real stronghold, where the shabab were Salafis and stronger and disciplined. That’s why they could give balance to the Sunnis and halt the conspiracy against them. All Sunni forces in Lebanon united. “In Beirut and here there are weapons, personal weapons, and it isn’t enough. But we have faith. We don’t need Al Qaeda. The Salafi Current is on the ground. It has forces.”
As long as the Salafi movement existed, there was no need for Al Qaeda in Lebanon. “The Salafi street in Lebanon has its presence, its strength, and we will hopefully work on strengthening it,” Shahal said. “Salafis in Lebanon are intelligent, and they know the ground. They know the Lebanese situation, and they can play the game by its internal rules [meaning they had a local agenda], and they are not incapable of military conflict when it’s needed. We don’t need human support from outside Lebanon. What we need is psychological support and financial support. This is not a call to jihad. It’s a call to self-defense. We don’t expect any support from the regimes but from those who are convinced in our religion and our call.”
Sunni militias were beginning to form, and in Majd al-Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon’s Beqaa, irate shabab closed the key Masnaa border road to Syria. On May 12 I drove there to check it out. Few roads led into the tightly connected narrow streets, where the plethora of mosques and the austerity and solidarity, among other things, reminded me of Falluja. I stopped to see if the mukhtar, Shaaban al-Ajami, was home. He was not. A muscular policeman with long hair stood in front of a mosque across the street, watching us. Suspicious locals stopped me to ask who I was. A hardened woman led us to a roadblock, just past a large intersection leading to the Syrian border crossing at Masnaa. Lebanese soldiers perched indolently atop their armored personnel carriers, phlegmatically watching anarchy as several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, pistols, and hand grenades manned roadblocks of earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command—it was a mob, not a militia, and so even more frightening. The men were angry, afraid, suspicious, shouting at strangers and one another, each one an authority unto himself. They carelessly swung their weapons around, oblivious to where they were pointing. Some rested the barrels of their rifles on top of their feet, a sign they had no professional training. A car approached with a family inside. They surrounded it, shouting at the passengers. A woman inside shrieked in fear. Local police showed up in an official pickup truck; the young muscular policeman with long hair emerged and greeted the armed men, warmly kissing and embracing them.
When strangers approached, the men immediately demanded to know if they were Sunni or Shiite. Hundreds of Syrian laborers carrying bags and baskets descended from buses and walked between the earth barriers on their way to the border. Two old men were detained, their identity cards revealing them to be Shiites. Locals sitting in the shade by shops quickly descended when they heard Shiites were found. Rifles were loaded and a frisson passed through the mob. The harrowed Shiites were finally released unscathed.
Nabil Jalul, a redheaded thirty-four-year-old local leader, carried a tiny pistol he could hide in his pocket. He wore a ski mask but raised it above his brows so we could talk. He used the language of the takfiris I had met in Iraq, those extreme Sunnis who declare other Muslims who do not share their austere practices (especially Shiites) to be kufar (infidels). He called Shiites rafidha (rejectionists), an anti-Shiite slur, and told me they had been armed by the Nusayris, a slur for Alawites, meaning the Syrian regime. Shiites were agents of the Israelis, he said, and they had not liberated their holy sites in Iraq from the American occupiers, so who could take Shiites in Lebanon seriously when they spoke of liberating Jerusalem from the Israeli occupiers? “We fight based on a creed,” he said, while “they” (meaning Hizballah) used weapons against other Lebanese. “Resistance is not about entering Beirut and oppressing its people. This roadblock is for victory in Beirut and the Sunnis. We won’t open the road until they open the airport.”
Nabil referred to Hizballah (which means Party of God) as Hizb al-Lat (Party of Lot), meaning the party of sin. Like many other Salafis, he also called them Hizb Ashaytan (Party of the Devil). “We are the shabab of Majd al-Anjar,” he said. “We fight the rafidha. We ruled for hundreds of years. We have many mujahideen and martyrs in Iraq. If the Sunnis of Beirut call us, we will come.” He told me many jihadist websites published calls for Sunni volunteers to come to Lebanon. Some required secret passwords, but he wouldn’t give me his.
Nabil had no formal military training, but, like many in the Beqaa, he began handling weapons at a young age. His life changed when he fell under the influence of Abu Muhamad, a local of Kurdish descent who had been one of Zarqawi’s deputies. Abu Muhammad’s real name was Mustafa Ramadan. An ethnic Kurd from Beirut who had once been a hoodlum who drank alcohol, he married a woman from Majd al-Anjar and moved to Denmark. He returned a Salafi and recruited some youth from the town to his own network, finally going to Iraq with his sixteen-year-old son. Abu Muhamad was trained in Afghanistan and was part of Basim al-Kanj’s Dinniyeh group. He was arrested in 2002 in a mosque in Majd al-Anjar. After four months in prison he used his connections and paid his way out. In Iraq he was said to have dispatched the car bomb that killed SCIRI leader Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim in 2003. He died fighting in Iraq, in an attack on the Abu Ghraib prison that nearly breached its walls.
Nabil’s brother-in-law was killed fighting in Rawa, a town in Iraq’s Anbar province, in June 2003. I visited the town the morning after dozens of Iraqi and foreign fighters had been slain in their desert camp by Americans. Locals buried them by a mosque, placing their ID cards in bottles that served as tombstones. Other youths from Majd al-Anjar were buried in Rawa that day. One of them was the son of Abu Muhamad, which was why he was also known as Abu Shahid, or father of the martyr. At least seven young men from the town were martyred in Iraq, and Nabil had a plaque in their honor in his guest room.
Nabil was jailed from 2004 until 2005, accused of plotting to bomb Western embassies and other targets. He later proudly showed me the many articles about his arrest and release. He was released with other jihadists at the same time as Samir Geagea, a Lebanese war criminal and leader of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. The release of the radical Sunnis was meant to placate Sunnis and bolster the Sunni credentials of the Future Movement.
Majd al-Anjar was an important smuggling center. After the American invasion of Iraq, Nabil smuggled weapons and fighters into Syria and Iraq. Smugglers from the town relied on dirt roads through the mountainous border. All of Lebanon’s political factions relied on smuggling through Syria, Nabil told me. Many of the Lebanese officers at the border received salaries from smugglers that could reach five thousand dollars a month. Smuggling was still a good business, but it was more difficult now. Only special explosives were smuggled from Lebanon to Iraq, such as C4 and TNT. He showed me a picture of himself from the early days of the Iraq War, with a beard down to his chest. Back then he was so religious he refused to own a television.
Abu Muhamad would come from Iraq and meet Nabil in Damascus, where they rented apartments. Nabil delivered truckloads of weapons to him: bombs and explosives as well as missiles and silencers for pistols. They bribed Syrian customs officials and used clandestine dirt roads. Nabil’s friend Ismail Khatib purchased the weapons, sometimes with his own money, and handled communication with their brethren in Ir
aq. “We were a very tight group,” Nabil said. “We couldn’t be penetrated.” Ismail’s cousin Ali was among the dead in Rawa in 2003. After another fighter was killed in Iraq and two trucks of weapons were seized, the authorities began to watch their network. The Syrians, who still maintained bases in Lebanon at the time, had an intelligence headquarters nearby. Nabil was arrested on September 19, 2004, two months after his last delivery of weapons to Syria. The Syrians were the ones who sent Nabil to prison. “They decided to stop the flow of foreigners into Iraq,” Nabil told me, “just like all the Arabs who changed their policies suddenly and decided to look good for the Americans.”
Majd al-Anjar was also an important stop in the network that smuggled fighters to Iraq from Lebanon and its Palestinian camps, especially Ayn al-Hilweh. Dozens of men from that camp were martyred in Iraq. Among its most famous martyrs was Abu Jaafar al-Qiblawi. His poster hung above one of the main roads in that camp. Nabil was his friend and had smuggled him into Syria. Ismail took him on to Iraq. In the last film showing Zarqawi, Abu Jaafar was the one who handed a machine gun to him. He was killed with Zarqawi in June 2006. After his death a thirteen-minute video, filmed in August 2005 on the banks of a river, showed his last will. In the video he held a machine gun and addressed his parents, calling on his father to remain steadfast and his brothers to join the jihad. The mujahideen would be victorious, he said, in their fight against the greatest power in the world, America, which was the leader of nonbelief. America had to be destroyed, he said, and Muslim lands had to be liberated. He sang songs for his mother and to his beloved. One of Abu Jaafar’s brothers was killed in the Nahr al-Barid battle in 2007, and another was arrested in 2008 by the Lebanese army while attempting to smuggle a Saudi fighter out of Ayn al-Hilweh.